CodiferL said:
After the first atomic test Oppenheimer wrote that "the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose." Nuclear weaponry should never have been created, and it's so friggin' hard to put back in the box once it's begun to proliferate. Fuck those asshole eggheads who decided that science needn't rein itself in in the name of morality and have given us the power to more or less destroy ourselves utterly.
Funny that you should mention a device that was only ever used twice on man. Napalm, flamethrowers, land mines and nerve gas all killed more than the two nukes on japan, and are FAR more horrific weapons.
what do we have thanks to nukes? Relatively speaking, wars have been reduced by a large amount. Compared to the first half of the 20th century, the second half was far less violent. There was no third GREAT war, like so many were predicting. The great battles fought were with science and technologies.
And the legacy of the atomic bomb? Nuclear power keeps our cities lit up in the night, providing safe electricity with no carbon emissions. Even with the russian RBMK debacle of Chernobyl, nuclear is ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE safer than coal.
Nuclear medicine is used to find problems in your body before they kill you. Because of this, we are able to find tumors and growths in a timely manner and precisely pinpoint where we need to target for treatment without having to go in and become exploratory.
Nuclear bombs led to these great things, and other great leaps in scientific fields. They have saved more lives than any other weapon.
